


gods & monsters

by adreamaloud, daneorange (adreamaloud)



Category: Lost Girl
Genre: F/F, Valkubus - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:37:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreamaloud/pseuds/adreamaloud, https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreamaloud/pseuds/daneorange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Almost doesn't count. Tamsin, hits and misses, and wars through the centuries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gods & monsters

**Author's Note:**

> All mistakes are mine.

_In the land of gods and monsters, I was an angel_ -Gods and monsters, Lana del Rey

 

Tamsin fiddles with the felt pouch and delights at the weight of it in her palm. "You must really want this woman," she says smugly, spilling its contents on the table: gold coins and rubies and diamonds and pearls. "For you to pay such a hefty sum."

She tries to look him in the eye -- much of her benefactor's face is hidden under a hood, but in the dark, the evil glint in his eye glows red, and she can practically smell the desperation off his skin.

 And while Tamsin has lived many lives and seen evil in many forms and hues: In mangled bodies piled up along the ancient streets of Rome, in the sound of a mother's cry for her slaughtered son, or in the orange color the sky took after she'd razed an entire city to the ground, delivering warrior after warrior to petty demigods and masters -- one look at this one tells her she's done playing with the small time _lords_.

 "Just find her," is all he says, voice gruff and grip tight around her wrist. "Use all your eternities if you have to."

  _All eternities._ "I only need one," she says confidently, her chest pounding under her armor.

 "Make it this one," her new master says. "Or I will hunt you down."

 " _I'm_ the hunter here," Tamsin counters.

 "And I know where to find you."

 *

 At some point, Tamsin starts dreading her dreams. They first come for her around her fifth reboot, while she’s sleeping in the middle the Gobi desert.

That time, she wakes up screaming and gasping, her hand sweaty around her axe.

*

It doesn’t really dawn on Tamsin, the big predicament she has in her hand, not until she nearly gets sliced in half in Vienna while battling hordes of Turks.

The thought hits her like the wrong end of a sword: _This woman cannot possibly exist._ At the time, she’d just finished sifting through piles of bodies, turning them over one by one with the tip of her sword – broad-shouldered warriors, women in tattered clothes, beggars caught in the crossfire.  A handful of children. All these centuries of warfare, and still, Tamsin finds herself flinching.

The swing comes out of nowhere; it grazes Tamsin’s armor as she barely dodges it, dragging her sword along as she sidesteps, cursing under her breath. She’s had three decades in this lifetime -- she’s not about to restart in the middle of the biggest fucking war she’s seen since _Hastings_.

She looks him in the eye as she drives her sword right into his ribcage – this one’s dark-haired and pale-faced, and his eyes shone as pockets of fire flickered in the distance. _Eyes both brown and blue,_ she remembers, pulling her weapon out and shaking the blood off before tucking it back in.

Night is falling and the wind has begun blowing harder. _This is going to be a hard winter,_ Tamsin sighs, looking around. Nothing moves; nothing’s _alive._ Tamsin runs her hand over her semi-damaged armor – the space is warm and wet. _Blood._

“You’re on a suicide mission, Tamsin.” The valkyrie who treats her this time is named Kara, and she’s an Austrian commander’s mistress. Kara tends to Tamsin’s wound just outside their camp’s walls; valkyries heal eventually, but in wars like this, nothing’s fast enough. “What sort of woman are you looking for?”

“One who’s too many things all at once,” Tamsin says, hissing as Kara presses harder against her. “And something tells me she isn’t here. _Again._ ”

“I heard things are going down in Cajamarca,” Kara offers, trying to smile. “This time of the year, Peru sounds nice.”

Tamsin tries to smile back. When you’ve had hundreds of battles between you, it’s the least you could do. “Perhaps warmer,” she replies, leaning back as Kara finishes with her bandages. “You should come with. This winter’s a bitch.”

“My mission is here,” says Kara. “You can tell me the full story when you’re done with yours.”

*

This lifetime, Acacia is a Spanish general’s mistress, and Tamsin runs into her in the Peruvian forest, while waiting a battle out. “I heard she’s not in Austria,” is how Acacia greets her, offering her a drink.

“I heard you’re about to deliver half this continent,” Tamsin says back, reaching for Acacia’s wineskin. “Hope you don’t mind if I take a look around.”

“Not at all,” Acacia shrugs. “Be my guest.” From where they’re standing, they can hear distant cries and horses running. Somewhere, a village is being razed to the ground; Tamsin can smell death in the air.

“But I think you know she isn’t here.”

Tamsin blinks, adjusting her armor. She feels it deep in her bones – this is not the lifetime she will get it right. “A war this size should be good for the soul,” she just says, fiddling with her quiver full of arrows. “Besides, I need to stay in shape. Target practice, if you will. Been a while since we last brought an entire continent to its knees.”

Acacia laughs. “You forget the work we did with the Mongols in Baghdad, darling.” Tamsin laughs along, nodding as she passes back Acacia’s wineskin.

“That wasn’t quite a continent,” Tamsin counters.

“You do know we’re doing _just half_ here,”’ says Acacia.

“ _Just_ half? You’re insane.”

Acacia drains what’s left of the wine before throwing the empty bag away. “The mission is what matters,” she says, looking ahead. At this time of the night, the faraway fires brighten the horizon like little sunrises. “And this is mine.”

Tamsin thinks about hers; what are the chances indeed that the woman she’s looking for is here? _Nil_ , if she goes by Acacia’s instinct as well as her own. Still, the distant sound of horses galloping puts an ounce of excitement in her blood that she cannot ignore.

“And I’m just here for the show,” she just says, grip tightening around her sword.

*

The dreams keep coming, and Tamsin learns how to manage them, eventually; learns how to grit her teeth and keep herself from shouting through every dreamscape’s glimpse of torture. Some mornings after she wakes with the taste of blood in her mouth; some others, with fresh bruises right where her tormentors had branded her while asleep.

Tamsin doesn’t kid herself – of course, it’s all _real_. The mission goes on, even when she’s sleeping.

At some point, she teaches herself to sleep without dreaming – some black art she learns from a shaman in Bhutan. Then she teaches herself to go for days without sleeping at all.

“That can’t be good for your hair,” a valkyrie warns.

“It’s kept me alive for a hundred years,” she just says back, stroking the blade of her sword.

*

On moments she slips – be it an extraordinarily exhausting week, or a severe blow to the head, or whatever else that causes a brief blackout – they come for her in the dark, bearing hand-sized cards printed with the image of a man with his back turned. His face is never shown; his suit changes with the years.

“He’s watching,” says one of his minions, voice flat and toneless.

“He’s counting,” says the other.

 _Your woman does not exist,_ she curses at her benefactor. _I have been wandering for centuries. Surely, this cannot be that difficult._

When she wakes up, the card is in her hand. The first few times, she keeps them, thinking they would all amount to something – like pieces of a giant puzzle, or a map. A clue to end her millennia of searching.

They were none of that, of course; after the nth card, Tamsin burns them all by the side of a mountain, using the fire to warm herself and cook supper.

*

Then, as if to spite her for her belligerence, Tamsin finds _her_ – in the arms of a king, no less, with an army of thousands. Tamsin rolls her eyes before cracking her knuckles. _So this is how you want it done, eh?_

Also: Nobody warned her she would be this _beautiful_ – in a way that makes Tamsin go, _Oh. This one could launch ships by the hundreds of thousands, just by lifting her smallest finger._

And in what would be the single most ill-advised thing Tamsin has ever done in her many lifetimes: She decides to draw this one out. Take her time – like the cards mean nothing and she isn’t losing sleep on this.

She takes a room in one of the inns and pays handsomely for a view of the queen’s porch, trying to convince herself to just aim, do it and get it done. _All it takes is a shot,_ she tells herself, watching as the queen tended to her small garden there – a handful of herbs in pots, all neatly put side by side to catch some sun. In this light, she is so _radiant_ that it hurts to look at her – and for all the wrong reasons.

 _Get a hold of yourself,_ Tamsin thinks, gritting her teeth.

The queen chooses that moment to turn her head, angling her face in a way that seems like she’s looking directly at Tamsin. _Eyes both brown and blue,_ Tamsin just thinks, looking away, feeling flushed.

*

At some point, Tamsin thinks, _This is not going to happen, not from this far._ That night, she leaves her room and heads for the castle, entering the gates in the guise of a guest – after all, where she came from (a land of gods, a land of monsters), valkyries are _angels --_ killers with angelic faces, yes, but angelic no less.

True enough, when she gets to the banquet, she is greeted with bows and curtsies _._ She takes a glass of wine and arranges the hem of her dress, trying to ignore the itchy spot where the tip of her knife worries the skin of her thigh underneath all the layers.

She finds the queen in one of the pocket gardens, looking up at the sky. The moon is full tonight – the king is fond of throwing parties during bright moonlit nights like this.

“Beautiful, no?” the queen says without turning toward her. Her voice startles Tamsin, who had been trying to walk toward her quietly all along.

“What is, your highness?” asks Tamsin, in the kindest tone she can muster. Inside, the party begins to get rowdier as the string band starts a faster tune. _Not now,_ Tamsin tells herself, absently feeling for the edge of her knife, her eyes fixed on the queen’s moonlit back.

“The moon. The kingdom,” the queen replies. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“For the moon, your highness?”

When the queen turns around finally, Tamsin breathes her in; she smells of jasmine and wine. She takes a step closer, and Tamsin is too stunned to move away when she reaches for her. “The kingdom,” the queen continues. When she touches Tamsin’s face, Tamsin feels a warm glow spread across her chest. “I’ve seen you. From your window. You’ve been looking. You’ve been waiting.”

 _You have no idea,_ Tamsin thinks. And then, _You are so beautiful._ Tamsin finds herself blinking at that, a chill running down her spine.   _God damn it,_ she realizes finally. _The woman he wants is a succubus._

“I believe you are mistaken,” Tamsin recovers, stepping away. Some battles you have to regroup from; this is one of those battles.

“I believe not,” the queen insists. She takes a step closer again; under the faint moonlight, Tamsin can see her eyes shine the brightest blue. _What do we have here,_ Tamsin just thinks, the chill in her bones running deeper.

_The woman exists. And now I have to deliver._

Tamsin does not know what hit her – all she knows is that the queen has closed the gap between their faces with her lips. Tamsin knows a thing or two about succubi, but you haven’t really kissed one until _you have kissed one_ : The sensation’s a lot like having a silk scarf pulled out of your throat, but a lot warmer. Elsewhere on her body it feels like she’s being struck with electric rods.

When they break apart, the queen is gasping. “ _What_ are you?” Her eyes glisten dangerously in the dark. Tamsin falls a few steps backward as she catches her own breath.

“What do you mean, _what_ am I?

 “A seer warned me about you,” the queen says, touching the corner of her lips with a finger. “She spoke to me on my wedding day.”

“My sincerest apologies,” says Tamsin, managing a smirk finally. “It was not my intention to ruin the occasion.”

The queen starts circling her; first at a distance, then much closer – again. Tamsin does not fully understand yet what is happening here, though the game has changed drastically since finding out that she’s up against a succubus. _I should have finished this before I saw your face,_ Tamsin thinks, clutching at her dress tightly.

Pressing up against Tamsin, the queen gives her another kiss – slower now, like she were actually _tasting_ Tamsin and taking her time. “You taste like a million victories,” she tells Tamsin afterward, licking her bottom lip. “Truth be told, this was not what I expected.”

“We’ve all been deceived at some point.” Tamsin feels her breath hitch as the queen pulls her closer, running her hand across her dress.

The queen smiles as she presses down against the knife under Tamsin’s gown. “They told me that as queen, I was no longer in a position to make trouble,” she begins, stroking lightly. Tamsin feels a slight burn right under the queen’s hand – it feels a lot like she’s _marking_ her. “But this is _my_ kingdom, and these are _my_ people. Do you understand?”

Tamsin finds herself nodding, swallowing hard at the feel of the queen slipping her hand under her dress and feeling for the knife, pausing for a moment to rub at the raw patch of skin under the knife’s tip before sliding it out. Tamsin hisses throughout the queen’s deliberate slowness.

“Enjoy the rest of your evening,” the queen says, tucking the knife into her bosom before walking away. “Until we meet again.”

 *

Between that full moon and the next, Tamsin mostly keeps to herself in her room. Her encounter with the queen had left her puzzled – What did this seer tell the queen anyway? Did the queen think she was a threat? If so, why hadn’t she stabbed her dead when she had the knife?

 _My knife,_ Tamsin remembers. That knife was her best one – it had seen hundreds of battles. _Of all ways to lose it,_ she just thinks, shaking her head.

Some days, when Tamsin looks out her window, she catches the queen’s eye; some days, the queen even smiles.

 _A queen and a knife,_ Tamsin muses. _Enough reason to go back to the castle._

*

The next big feast at the castle is for the king’s birthday, and Tamsin has seen enough birthdays of various royalties to know what that means: Tournaments.

 _At least I won’t have to wear a dress this time,_ she smiles to herself, suiting up on the day. She paces around and tests her sword, swinging it around and checking its weight.

She’s up eighth and is paired against one of the older knights. Under her helmet, she is no different from the others. As they enter the arena, they lift their visors to pay respects to the king and queen before their fight; the queen recognizes her at once, her eyes turning blue briefly as Tamsin lowers her visor.

Tamsin makes quick work of the old knight, and of the warriors that came after; not necessarily painless, but not unnecessarily cruel either.

“Are you usually that merciful to opponents?” the queen asks. After the fight, she requested for a private audience with the day’s most successful fighter. Tamsin stands and removes her helmet, lowering her sword on a nearby table.

“Not too often,” says Tamsin. “Though I treasure opportunities to be merciful – not everyone is as lucky. Don’t you think?”

The queen smiles at her – the way she does on those afternoons Tamsin catches her eye on her porch. “I believe I have something that is yours,” she says, producing Tamsin’s knife.

“And you are returning this at what cost?”

“It costs nothing,” the queen says. “I believe you’re one of the good ones.”

 _You don’t know me,_ Tamsin almost says; she bites down on her tongue instead. “Well, then. If you ever need my _services_ – you know where to find me.”

“I’ll be standing at my porch,” she says. “And I know where to look from there.”

Back in her room that night, Tamsin closes her window and stares at her knife, fire flickering off its blade. Right then, with the queen’s unsolicited trust, Tamsin feels like she’s one step closer to a checkmate – and she feels utterly _horrible_ about it.

 _Oh, I have doomed us both,_ Tamsin just thinks, stroking the blade just hard enough to draw blood.

*

By the time the war comes to this kingdom, Tamsin is more afraid than excited. _This means we are really coming for her._ She gears up for battle and opens her window – as expected, there the queen is, standing on her porch, looking at Tamsin’s direction solemnly. Like she’s saying,  _It is time. I need you._

The battle is already in motion as Tamsin hits the streets – it starts with a few dozen foot soldiers running about with daggers. It is nothing Tamsin hasn’t seen before, but she keeps looking at the castle’s direction that she nearly gets sliced through _twice._

 _Focus, valkyrie,_ she tells herself, slashing her way through a handful of soldiers.

When she reaches the queen’s tower, she is hurriedly ushered in by her guards, smuggled through the small opening of her tower’s gates.

“You’ve seen the sort of evil these men could do,” the queen begins, speaking to Tamsin right inside her quarters. “They would burn the entire place down if they could--”

Tamsin contemplates what to say – had she actually seen too much of these wars that she’s had enough to be numb? “War is horrible,” she finds herself saying.

“--But they won’t, because I won’t let them.”

“Excuse me?” Tamsin blinks. “I didn’t quite catch what you were saying—”

“I won’t let them,” she repeats. And then, taking Tamsin’s hands in hers: “You and I, we are _stronger_ than these men.”

Tamsin takes a moment to look at her -- _heart both strong and gentle,_ she just thinks. “How are you even _real_?” she finds herself whispering. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, I should be down there fighting.”  

“That _wasn’t_ what I meant.”

“That’s what we are doing.” And then, “Are you with me?”

Tamsin thinks about ending it here: Right inside the queen’s quarters, she can pierce her heart and bring her in, and she would still be giving her what could possibly be the gentlest death. In the midst of this – what are the queen’s options? If she’s dying anyway, shouldn’t it best be in Tamsin’s hand?

“I asked you: Are you with me?”

 _No,_ Tamsin shakes her head, putting her sword back into its sheath. _Fuck this._ “Let’s go fight a war, my queen.”

*

This is how it slips from her hands the first time: Tamsin holds the fort as the queen’s guards take her away. It ends with an unseen sword across her body – it enters from atop her right shoulder and pierces through her heart, exiting through her left side.

In the relatively longer dream that comes after, Tamsin finds herself in a dungeon, tortured by card-bearing minions.

 _The mission is what matters,_ they remind her, over and over, for many dark days.

*

At Leipzig, centuries later, she runs into Acacia, now a mistress of a German doctor. “I heard you took a sword for her that last time.”

Tamsin winces at that; she still remembers the first time that memory came back to her this lifetime – it was like feeling the sword go through her many times over.

“It was not my best moment,” Tamsin concedes. “But I’d get it right this lifetime.”

 _And the next, if I have to. And all my eternities afterward._ To this moment, Tamsin is still trying to convince herself that she is _not_ looking forward to running into the succubus in this lifetime.

“And so we continue to hope,” Acacia just says, standing aside Tamsin on top of a cliff, looking out on the battlefield, waiting for blood.

#


End file.
